


Roses of Rapture

by Silas16



Category: BioShock 1 & 2 (Video Games), BioShock Infinite
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 14:51:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19793173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silas16/pseuds/Silas16
Summary: Elizabeth DeWitt, a schoolteacher in a poorer part of New York City in 1959, is about to start the most interesting year of her career.Picks up soon after the end of BioShock 1, includes Infinite and Burial at Sea as canon.





	Roses of Rapture

Elizabeth DeWitt had only been a schoolteacher for a couple of years come September 1st, 1959. She told herself at first that it was a temporary thing, just to get enough to pay off her father's debts and leave New York for Paris. But as time continued to pass, and the raise Principal Forrester always promised her never appeared, she found herself becoming part of the community. Her students knew and liked her, and their parents – well, their parents' opinions of her often depended on how well they knew or didn't know her father.  
  
After a hectic August assembling the necessary supplies – with less than the necessary budget – for her classroom, she felt mostly ready to start the year. With what she hoped was a comforting smile, she escorted Mr. and Mrs. Gladson out of her classroom door. They had recently moved into the neighborhood and their son, little Billy, was a constant anxiety of theirs. The typical syndrome of parents of an only child: many questions about sanitation, cafeteria diets, and curriculum. They'd come a whole hour before school started and ambushed her in her own classroom. Feeling peevish over the invasion of her space, she told Billy a little too forcefully to get a tissue from her desk when she spotted him wiping boogers under his desktop.  
  
A quick glance at the clock over the door told her she had only five minutes before class started. There were seventeen students in her class according to the roll she'd received last week – up two from the count she'd been given a month ago, but still less than last year's class. She gave a little sigh of relief as she sat and once more organized her desk. Last year's class had been tough to manage with twenty-one. She'd dedicated some of her summer break to studying up on group psychology tactics. Her main sourcebook had been from the point of view of a prison warden, but she'd found the differences between inmates and eight-year-olds to be minimal.  
  
The last three students made their way into the room just as the start of class bell rang. Perfect. No absences on the first day made things so much easier. She smoothed her pencil skirt – a dark blue – stood, smiled, and introduced herself to the class, who were fairly quick to quiet down. She had taken roll and was just getting them into the rhythm of responding “Yes, Miss DeWitt.” in unison when there was a knock at her door.  
  
She frowned and strode to the door, in the opposite corner of the room from her desk. She cracked the door open and saw Principal Forrester standing there.  
  
“Principal Forrester,” she said, stretching her tight mouth into a smile she hoped was friendly. “How can I help you?”  
  
“Miss DeWitt, might I have a word with you?” the principal said. He was a rotund man, just a little shorter than herself, with hair and mustache between gray and silver and large spectacles. He thumbed his suspenders in a way she recognized as showing he was nervous about something.  
  
“Of course.” Elizabeth pulled back into the classroom, told the children she was leaving and to behave themselves. She responded with a sharp look to their general grumbling, which got a “Yes, Miss DeWitt.” she could accept. She stepped back through the door, closing it behind her.  
  
It was then that she noticed a group of half a dozen girls standing just where she hadn't been able to see them around the door. They fidgeted, but stood mostly still, and very quiet. They wore dresses of varying colors in an identical style with white collars and aprons. Each dress was dirty and stained, and the girls were as nervous as Forrester, if not more.  
  
“Alright, young ladies, this is Miss DeWitt, she'll be your teacher, starting today.”  
  
Elizabeth's eyes widened. Twenty-three students? It was far too many. “Principal Forrester, I need a word.” She stopped herself from yanking his arm as she pulled him aside. “There must be some kind of mistake. All the students on my roll are in class already.”  
  
“Last minute enrollment, Miss DeWitt. Couldn't be helped.” He clasped his hands behind his back and stood up straight in a posture she knew he intended to project authority, but instead made him look like the head of the Lollipop Guild.  
  
“How last minute does it have to be for you to not even give me a day's notice?”  
  
“Last minute as in their father just dropped them off not five minutes ago.”  
  
That stunned Elizabeth just long enough for Forrester to take advantage. “Miss DeWitt will show you your seats, young ladies. She will help you with any other needs you may have.” He gave a slight bow and tottered away back toward his office. Elizabeth bit back a curse as she glared at his retreating back. Nothing to be done about it now.  
  
She turned back to the girls and smiled, trying her best to be sincere. “Hello, girls. It's very nice to meet you. You're... sisters?” They nodded. How odd. Forrester had said “their father”, but these girls didn't look to be related at all. That was hardly her business, though. “What are your names?”  
  
“Adelaide.”  
  
“Quinn.”  
  
“Cadence.”  
  
“Lucy.”  
  
“Olive.”  
  
“Susie.”  
  
“Well, girls, if you can be this polite all the time, I think you'll do very well in my class.” Quinn, Adelaide, Olive, and Lucy smiled. Susie bit her lip nervously and Cadence looked at her feet. Elizabeth's heart wrenched to see that all of the girls were barefoot. “Oh, girls! Where are your shoes?”  
  
“Papa Jack said he would get us some soon,” Quinn said, grinning.  
  
“But it's okay,” said Lucy, bouncing on her heels, “We're used to not having shoes.”  
  
A loud laugh from the other side of the door reminded Elizabeth that she had other students likely coming to a boil by now. “Okay, girls. Let's get you to your seats and introduce you to the other students. Alright?”  
  
“Yes, Miss DeWitt,” the six girls all said together. Something about how their smiles all seemed to match in that moment put a chill down her spine.  
  
She shook it off and ushered the girls through the door. She brought them up to the front – where they naturally stood in a row – and introduced them to the class. Most of the students gawked at them. The students all lived around here and so a good portion of them had patched or threadbare clothing, but nothing in the state that these girl wore. And all of them had shoes.  
  
Elizabeth guided the sisters to the empty seats in the back of the class; three in the last row with other students, and the other three behind them. The rest of the day proceeded almost as well as she had planned, though she had stopped at one point to snatch a paper airplane Joshua had made to throw from his spot in the back. The sisters behaved themselves very well, better than the rest of the class, easily, but needed to be directed on where to go when lunch and play breaks came. It made her question if they had ever been in school before. From their state of dress, she thought maybe they hadn't, which, again, made her sad. She hoped not to meet this “Papa Jack” of theirs, or she was liable to give him a piece of her mind.  
  
At the last bell, Olive raised her hand from the back row. “Miss DeWitt, where do we go now?”  
  
“Home, silly!” said Kathleen as she picked up her bag and moved with the rest toward the door.  
  
Elizabeth said farewell to the class as a whole, sitting down at her desk, getting her papers ready for the end of day forms. She itched to get today over with, but forced away her impatience for the moment. “Kathleen's right, Olive. You're done for today. Do you girls... know how you're getting home?”  
  
They fidgeted in their seats. “Mister Papa said he'd come pick us up,” Cadence said, small in her seat.  
  
_Mister Papa?_ “But you don't know where to wait, do you?” Elizabeth said.  
  
They all shook their heads.  
  
She sighed. “Alright, let me finish the roll and I'll go wait with you.” She pulled over the roll sheet and double checked the names she'd ticked off before. Then started writing in the girls' names at the bottom of the list. She'd barely started the first one before catching herself. “What're your last names?”  
  
“Ryan,” they said together, but not in the same unison they had used before. It sounded more like how her students answered a question back to her. Some more or less quick than others. Did that mean it was a learned response, rather than an automatic one? What could that mean? She put it out of her mind, filling in the six girls' names, each with the surname Ryan.  
  
She then left the classroom with the sisters in single file behind her. She led them onto the sidewalk in front of the school, which bordered one of the cities busier streets. She had expected the girls to relax on getting outside, but they huddled together like nervous rabbits.  
  
“Isn't it nice out today?” Elizabeth said, gesturing to the cloudless sky. The girls didn't answer, which just confused her even more. Only a minute passed before the girls perked up, smiling and dashing forward to swarm around an approaching man, who knelt down and embraced them.  
  
He was a handsome man, in a way, but he looked almost as out of place as the girls. His clothes were dirty and stained, and the sleeves of his sweater had creases where they had once been rolled up. He was tall and built with lean muscle. There were a number of small scars on his face, and a couple of thicker ones that poked above the neck of his sweater.  
  
Elizabeth folded her arms. “Jack Ryan, I presume?”  
  
He stood and met her eyes. She blinked. He had an intense look, like she saw sometimes in her father when he talked about the war.  
  
Jack moved like he was about to speak, then stopped. He sighed.  
  
“Daddy Bubbles doesn't talk, Miss DeWitt,” Adelaide said, holding Jack's hand with both of hers. She spotted a tattoo on his wrist of three chain links.  
  
“Oh, my mother was deaf,” Elizabeth said, then started to sign a greeting towards him.  
  
“No, Miss DeWitt,” Quinn said, “he can hear you, he just doesn't talk.”  
  
Jack used his free hand to start signing toward her. He was slow, spelling everything but the most basic words out in letters, just like most speaking people did when first learning. _Did he injure his vocal cords somehow? Is that why he has scars?_  
  
**You help girls, thank you,** he signed to her.  
  
“Of course, Mister Ryan. Your girls are very well behaved, though I am concerned about-”  
  
She cut off as he broke eye contact with her, looking over her shoulder. She turned and gave a small gasp when she saw another, larger group of girls – all with the same sort of clothes as the girls in her class – approach from the school doors, a few of her colleagues trailing behind them. They all also swarmed around Jack. Some older, some younger. There were almost as many of them together as there were students in her class!  
  
“Mister Ryan, how did you come into custody of all of these girls?” Her words barely carried over the noise of the combined affections of the Ryan girls.  
  
“He saved us!” she heard a few of the girls say, but Jack made a soothing movement that quieted the whole group.  
  
He signed a goodbye to her before leading the girls away down the street, all of them now babbling excitedly about their first day of school. She stared at the man's retreating back, trying not to grit her teeth. Something between his casually ignoring her question and the girls' claim of “he saved us” put a gnawing frustration into her stomach. She hated not knowing something. It was in her nature to dig for answers whenever presented with a question.  
  
She would definitely get to the bottom of this one.

**Author's Note:**

> This story will likely update infrequently, if at all. Depends on if I firm up actual plans for this story going forward.
> 
> Feel free to comment with what you hope to see in this story. The more people want it, the more likely I am to come back to this.
> 
> This story operates under the assumption that since the Elizabeth that came to Rapture was from the world of Columbia, there is an Elizabeth in the world above Rapture, who's life is very different from the universe hopper we know.


End file.
